Right, if you want to read what I am replying to you will have to go
back to Norman's eloquent reply to my ..... well you get the picture.
I fear I was a touch spartan when I referred to free software. I do use
Firefox and some of the add-ons for that and there is a wonderful free
application for Windows call 'Irfan View' which has the dual attribiutes
of combining the fastest graphics viewing program I have found (for
Windows) with a lot of useful functions and a great little front end for
the scanner. I am typing this in Thunderbird (which I don't really like
but Turnpike, which dealt with these lists much better, will not run on
W7. I have not found how to turn on the speal chucker which is a pain
because I can't type fro toefef - there see what I mean ?
To be a tad serious, what I meant was that, as a generalisation, a
commercial program has to try to go that extra inch to look a bit
better, be a bit more usable and generally sell itself, Free software is
like that too sometimes, but very often it stops when the author thionks
it should - not the user. The other aspects of commercial software are
that it gets more advertising because someone is trying to sell it and,
if it sells well it gets updated and improved because there is the
feedback loop of getting a bit of cash for what you do. In my view it
all ground to a halt when there were no more new commercial programs. If
there is no money coming back you can't afford to go to foriegn or far
away shows so no shows so.....another, less pleasant, feedback loop.
When I said the QL was a business machine I meant that was how it was
marketed. Sold with a suite of office oriented programs and more
expensive than the spectrums of the time it was aimed at the business
user more than the gamer. (I don't recall saying it was a 32 bit
machine). There were games for it but nothing the retro gamers would
chop their left arm off to play again. My point was that, if you are
going to try to introduce people to the QL you will need something good
- better than what we have now. Nothing we have on the QL will impress a
MAC or PC user and many of the QL programmers decamped and pitched their
tents in LINUX city so you won't get many from there either.
The problem is that all the people who want to do this 'show the QL to a
wider public; trick can are doing it from inside their own little bit of
QL World. It is the things they like that they push. All very natural,
of course but, if you are really going to try to present it to a new
public you have to find a trick, a gimmick, a good game (QWord is pretty
cool, I think) a neat application, something to excite the vapid general
public who watch X Factor and Big Brother, by iPads and still think a
man who can kick a ball can be a genius. You see, all the users left in
the QL circle now are either tinkerers of people who use Quill, Nothing
wrong with that except, when you open the door to a new vistor it is
like saying, 'Come in, have a fish paste sandwich, make yourself a chair
and sit down'.
BTW yes I hated the root account in LINUX when I tried it and I also
hated the way I had to tell it there was a hard drive and there was a
CD. I tried it again, post Q40, on an old PC that I had here and I hated
searching for drivers and being snottily told I could write them myself,
or adapt them myself. I gather it is better now but I wanted it to work
without my having to program it. Just like this machine did. I have
other things to do - like the thing that I built the machine for. I have
a W7 machine because, when my old motherboard popped its caps a couple
of months ago I built a new one and put W7 on it so I knew my way round
the O/S because people still ask me to fix the mess they make of their
machines. It's fast, sometimes annoying and overly flashy but it runs
95% of the programs I need and, apart from card readers ( which seemto
consistently not work), I can plug any piece of hardware in , off the
shelf, and they work too.
I am not trying to be negative just to show you what you are up against
and to get you to look out from the circle of users you have and see the
world from a no QL Users point of view. Must get back behind taht
parapet. Still it has been a lively discussion.
--
Roy Wood
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